Uptime Kuma vs Healthchecks.io
Both are alternatives to Pingdom. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Healthchecks.io vs Uptime Kuma — same comparison, one verdict.
Uptime Kuma
TOP PICKThe self-hosted monitor that beat the paid ones on features.
Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool that does, for free and on your own server, most of what the paid services charge monthly for: HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS and keyword checks, 60-second intervals, a genuinely good dashboard, public status pages, and notifications to more than ninety services including Slack, Discord, Telegram, email and webhooks. It runs as one Docker container on hardware you already have. At roughly 89.7k GitHub stars it is one of the most-starred self-hosted projects in existence, and that popularity is deserved rather than fashionable — the free tiers of the commercial services are more limited than this is. MIT licensed, pushed to daily.
Healthchecks.io
Monitors the jobs that fail silently — the cron nobody noticed stopped.
Healthchecks solves the opposite problem from the rest of this page. Instead of pinging your site, it waits for your scheduled jobs to ping it, and alerts you when one does not — the nightly backup that quietly stopped running three weeks ago, the certificate renewal that failed, the data export nobody checked. That class of failure is invisible to every uptime monitor here, and it is usually the more expensive one. BSD-3-Clause, around 10.2k stars, self-hostable in Python with a hosted tier that has a free plan. It complements an uptime monitor rather than replacing one.
Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | Healthchecks.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 96 | 93 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Pricing | Free and open source. One Docker container on a server you already run. | Free and open source to self-host. Hosted plans have a free tier for a small number of checks. |
Uptime Kuma is Macrostack's recommended Pingdom alternative, so it's our pick here.
Uptime Kuma
Strengths
- +60-second checks and unlimited monitors with no plan to upgrade to
- +Public status pages included rather than sold separately
- +Notifications to 90+ services out of the box
- +MIT, one container, and the most-starred tool in the category
Trade-offs
- −It runs on your infrastructure — so it cannot tell you your infrastructure is down
- −Single-node by design; no multi-region checking
- −You own updates, backups and the uptime of the uptime monitor
- −No phone-call escalation or on-call rotation
Healthchecks.io
Strengths
- +Catches silent cron and backup failures nothing else on this page sees
- +Dead simple integration — one curl at the end of your job
- +BSD-3-Clause, self-hostable, with an honest hosted free tier
- +Notifications to email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks and more
Trade-offs
- −Not an uptime monitor — it does not check whether your site responds
- −Only sees jobs you have instrumented to report in
- −Self-hosting means running a Django application and a database
- −Complements rather than replaces the rest of this comparison
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-01. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.